Show Is Portrait of a Storm

'Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy' Is on Display at Anniversary

A photo by Bob Bowne of a pier in Ocean Grove, N.J., that is part of 'Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy' at the Museum of the City of New York.
Bob Bowne

By

Josh Dawsey

Oct. 23, 2013 9:54 p.m. ET

Against his wife's advice,
Thomas Kerr
stood on his balcony on Shore Front Parkway and took pictures as superstorm Sandy's waves lifted the Rockaways boardwalk like a cork.

For weeks, his family lived without electricity, scooping salt water from a flooded swimming pool to flush toilets. "That picture stayed in the camera for a long time," he said. "You couldn't power up a computer or anything. These were dark days."

His is one of about 200 photographs featured in "Rising Waters: Photographs of Sandy," an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York that documents Sandy's wreckage and the struggle to rebuild.

The exhibition, which continues through March, is one of several pegged to Tuesday, which marks one year since the Oct. 29 storm. The Hoboken Historical Museum and the Brooklyn Historical Society are also among those mounting exhibitions, and an exhibit called "Coming Together: Surviving Sandy" is on display at Industry City in Brooklyn.

"I believe these recent slices of history actually have the ability to draw more visitors than parts of the past people have no emotional resonance with," said
Susan Henshaw Jones,
director of the Museum of the City of New York. "The Revolutionary War in New York City was a staggeringly awful affair. But I don't know if I did that show if it would be a show that appeals broadly."

Half of the photographs in the exhibit were taken by professionals and half by amateurs. The museum had more than 10,000 entries, many from the Rockaways and Staten Island, two areas that sustained heavy damage. A jury winnowed the photos to about 200, looking for those that had an aesthetic appeal, technical merit and a documentary feel. With the advent of iPhones and social media sites, millions were enabled to chronicle the story of the storm.

"There were just some regular folk who probably should not have been where they were, but their work is enormously, enormously powerful," Ms. Jones said.

The images are wide ranging: waves topping a pier in Ocean Grove, N.J.; a woman clutching a "Wizard of Oz" snow globe outside of her torched home in Breezy Point, Queens; masses of serpentine power lines plugged into generators; the darkened blocks of Lower Manhattan.

In a downstairs gallery, the museum tells Sandy's story in six phases that stretch the arc of the past year. The story opens with photographs that display the raw force of the storm, moves to images that document the destruction in the immediate aftermath and then shows how people survived.

Portraits abound, of residents returning to their mud-splattered, toppled homes and of volunteers serving meals or handing out quilts. The exhibit concludes with a look at work still undone, from the Rockaways boardwalk to half-erected houses.

Sean Corcoran,
the museum's curator of photographs, said the institution wanted visitors to understand how the storm upended lives and created a sense of unease that still permeates.

"There are destruction pictures, but we didn't want to overload those images," said Mr. Corcoran. "We wanted this to not show 200 destroyed houses and leaving it at that."

After the storm, Richard Santaga of Belle Harbor, Queens, took pictures of an SUV crashed into a Rockaways living room and a bed on the verge of falling from a high window. But judges selected a different photo he had submitted, of a plywood sign sitting on a Rockaways beach that read, "No Retreat Not Now No Surrender Not Ever Rockaway."

Corrections & Amplifications Richard Santaga's photography was featured in the exhibit. In an earlier version of this article, his last name was misspelled.

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